Getting up in the morning is a struggle for most of us who have to commute, beat the traffic, and end up at work somewhere around 8 am. Unless you’re one of those few people who actually like to wake up early, you probably have an alarm on your phone or bedside table that you rely on to get you out of bed. Hitting the snooze button a few times seems harmless when you’re drifting back into dreamland, but end up 30 minutes late to work and it won’t seem so harmless anymore. Japanese company Eureka has developed an iPhone alarm app that uses Twitter and fear of embarrassment to make you rise and shine without hitting snooze.
The free Okite app (available in the Japanese iTunes store) looks like a normal alarm clock app at first glance. You can set up alarms, turn them on and off, and there is, naturally, a snooze button. The catch for late sleepers is that Okite automatically links with your Twitter account and posts embarrassing messages to your account every time you hit the fateful snooze button. The messages include things like “dressed as a sailor now” and “not enough talented people like me in the world” and are followed by the hashtag #Okite. According to sources who can actually read the app, the humor is distinctly Japanese in nature, but we’d sure like to be able to read all of the embarrassing messages. Most of your Twitter followers would probably figure out the deal after a while, but we definitely like the idea of motivation by fear of embarrassment. For most people it’s probably not a necessary app, but if you are a snooze abuser, what better way to force yourself out of bed than avoiding an embarrassing social media catastrophe? We’d like an English version, please.
